Who Ate My Tomatoes??

  Ok-- it's official...we own a pig.  A tomato-eating, pig-dog.  My husband and I keep asking the question that will never be answered, "WHY?"  "Why would Millie eat THAT?

  Why would our two-year old Chocolate Lab eat the garden's freshest produce?  Is it because it's displayed tantalizingly on our counter?  I mean, this dog is let out to do her "business" several times throughout the day and doesn't make a point to graze about in the garden, munching on tomatoes.  Does she have a vitamin C deficiency?  That's probably as likely as a complex-chemical deficiency that prompted her to feast upon the red, plastic ball-pit orbs.  This past Christmas she devoured the full-on Crayola crayons 64 pack.  I figured she had an artistic flair...which, turned out to be true when the dog-doo was arrayed in sierra red, peacock blue, and sunburst yellow...I actually began to look forward to the Spring thaw to uncover Millie's rare First Editions.  I will be forever grateful that she left the sharpener alone, a fact that did nothing to calm our eight year-old son's distress that his future in art was usurped by his pig-dog.


  While I am constantly perplexed by the "WHY's" of this entire sordid business...my husband has moved to guerrilla-like warfare tactics in attempting to stop the How's.  Unfortunately, the ground chili pepper on peanut butter toast did nothing to stop her hankering for his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches but rather divulged her taste for Cajun foods.  I won't go into the gory details that brought about the lecture to our 15 year-old son why it is not a good idea to go frogging and leave the entrails in the garden.  Yes, I guess boys still do go frogging...but that's a story for another day. 

  If I could figure out technology I'd post a video of her tail disappearing around the top of the stairs as she places herself in time-out.  Yes, she doesn't even have to hear "MILLIE!!!!" before she races upstairs and disappears.  She knew she'd been busted after hearing ours shocked gasps whilst surveying a large, vine-ripened horror that resembled a shark bit vegetable surrounded with oozing seeds scattered about the crime scene in the kitchen.  Our second eldest daughter felt oddly justified in her teenaged "MmmmHmmm" since she had been blamed for taking the last three tomatoes the day before.  Seriously, why weren't we suspicious that she would eat three?  Most parents would be proud of the vegetable consumption...but our produce was disappearing at an alarming rate.

  Oddly, we have ghost peppers lining the counter's edge...still no takers.  I guess pig-dogs are smart...or picky.